Democratic Practices Tackling Grand Challenges - Affect, Dissensus and Ethics of Alterity

Democratic enterprises have been claimed to contribute to tackle grand challenges. This claim, however, has mostly stayed on a theoretical level. Disjunct research on alternative organizing has leaned into empirical practice and affect studies. It is currently not clear how dissensus relates or coins democratic organizing and whether this is linked to a novel democratic ethics. This research explores democratic practices in an ethnographic study of a small professional cooperative, investigating their affectual coloring by ethics of alterity and dissensus. We find six interrelated practices that coin the democratic collaboration: societizing (1), acknowledging (2), translucentizing (3), delegating (4), flowing (5) and second order deciding (6). Especially, the core social practices display a democratic ethics of alterity, which however goes beyond respecting gender, race and class developing sensitivities for a multiplicity of life …